Intentionally aiming toward a more joyful life

Tag Archives: depression

Wow, it has been silent here for a while hasn’t it? We have had a very crazy February here at our house. I have been struggling with feeling helpless and hopeless for the last few weeks, which is not a great motivator for me to write. We have had snowstorm after snowstorm, with another one due to hit today. We battled a stomach virus, with five of the six of us succumbing. And my second oldest has moved back home. That is a lot of upheaval for two weeks. Continue reading →

So many people make New Year’s resolutions to improve their lives at this time of year. According to Nielsen, popular resolutions include health goals, happiness goals, and financial goals. I usually fall into the 16% of Americans who don’t make resolutions. I know that real change needs to come from within, and simply flipping a page on a calendar is not sufficient motivation to sustain real change. At least not for me, and I guarantee I am not unique in this. Continue reading →

I love this exercise of finding something each week to be deeply grateful for. I try every day to be thankful for something, but to write an entire blog post every week about a blessing is a welcome challenge. At first, I wanted to find crazy things for my focus, but then I shifted to just being grateful for the good things in my life. Today, I want to be thankful for something that could be considered tragic. I am grateful today for the lessons from my two dysfunctional marriages. Continue reading →

I was reading a post on Facebook by Sharon Astyk (here is her quiet-for-now blog) who used a personal example of a crisis in her life to explain that we really don’t understand our fellow countrymen right now, and we are only just now realizing we have been completely miscommunicating for a long time. That we need to sit down and really listen to discover how our neighbors see the world because it might be radically different than we do. In the comments (I know, never read the comments, but her Facebook friends are generally very respectful), someone remarked, “We all desperately want to be “read” by others, and (at least for me) it’s so hard to get past innate self-centeredness and lack of communication skills. And yeah, a neighbor could be all the things we fear. Love is stronger than fear, but is expensive. But why else are we here? We’re all so needy and broken.” Love is expensive. Is it? Continue reading →

My church has a tradition we call Month of Sundays, in which the entire month (usually one with five Sundays, so it varies by year) is connected by a single theme. This year the theme is Joy. I mean, true happiness, not J.O.Y. Last night we had a movie night and we watched the movie Inside Out. I have to confess that it made me weep. Continue reading →

Today I saw myself through a new set of eyes. I have seen myself many, many times. After 40 years, I think I am pretty familiar with what I look like. I have blue, uneven eyes. My resting face looks like a frown because I have a downturned mouth. I seem to cock my head ever so slightly to the left, probably because my left shoulder sits higher than my right. I have strong eyebrows, and my nose looks “perky” because I broke it when I was 12. I am starting to develop lines across my forehead from furrowing my brow against the sun or while in deep thought. Continue reading →

Some weeks it is really easy to find things to be grateful for. Other weeks I spend waiting for inspiration to strike with that one Wow! moment that just screams to be shared. I end up on Wednesday night thinking, ‘I know I have lots to be grateful for, so why can’t I write anything?’ This is one of those latter weeks. I could ooh and ahh over the beautiful sunsets, or the fact that I have actually been getting enough sleep this week for a change. I could gush about school being back in session or about more personal things that I’m just not ready to share publicly yet. So here I am on Wednesday night racking my brain to come up with something to be truly and deeply grateful for. Continue reading →

Today I am out of my usual routine, so I thought I would share something that I wrote for a church service this past winter. I was asked to share my personal credo, my system of beliefs. Since my religion does not have one specific dogma, we sometimes have services in which a handful of us share our own beliefs. It is so fun to hear the ideas that govern each of our lives. So here today is n explanation of my own personal religious beliefs. I hope something here resonates with you.Continue reading →

What a crazy statement! Joy killed my soul? Not exactly. More precisely, it was JOY that killed my soul. Perhaps I should explain. I have noticed an epidemic of low self-esteem in our society. I believe there are many contributors to this problem, but I want to focus on one that I suspect is very influential. Let me start by saying that I have lots of friends who are religious, and very devout. My brother-in-law is a Lutheran minister, and another friend is a Catholic blogger. They are great people. I am not here to bash on Christianity or religion in general. It is just this one notion that I would like people to rethink.